INTELLIGENT BRANDS // Cloud no longer accept business interruption of more than three hours and loss of business data of more than one hour .
IT organisations are therefore under pressure to accept these recovery time objectives and recovery point objectives that specify the maximum losses in interruption that business managers are ready to accept in the event of failure of any type . Availability of cloud and virtualisation solutions and cloud service providers are making it possible to now extend the protection of continuity to wider areas of the business at much lower costs and complexity .
To synchronise between a live site and an offline recovery site , three typical stages have traditionally been adopted and the same are carried forward into cloud based solutions including cold , warm and hot recovery sites . Cold sites have less investment and take much longer to recover , while hot sites have extensive investment and are near ready for switch-over .
A cold recovery site is typically a disconnected replica of the live site and go live at the times of recovery is a manual step by step build up process , with possible failures and delays . A cold site is also not usually a routinely tested and standby site . A hot recovery site on the other hand maintains near immediate application and data availability through a high-speed network connection , server clustering , and synchronous replication . A hot site also goes through regular maintenance ,
Key takeaways
Yasser Zeineldin is CEO of eHosting DataFort .
upgrades , and is usually a complex and expensive solution .
Adding to the costs of traditional disaster recovery and business continuity solutions is the fact that such sites need to be geographically remotely located , require duplication of most of the IT assets , and if warm or hot sites need to have their share of skilled IT resources to manage their state of data and application readiness . Lastly , any type of recovery site whether cold , warm , or hot needs to be tested in terms readiness , adding to the costs of managing traditional solutions .
Cloud based solutions offer key advantages over traditional disaster recovery solutions . An integral part of a cloud solution is virtualisation of IT asset resources thereby reducing the cost of replicating IT assets for the recovery site and the reduced cost of managing
• Exponential growth of data traffic is bringing to close viability of business continuity solutions that rely on traditional computing
• To synchronise between a live site and an offline recovery site three typical stages have traditionally been adopted
• An integral part of cloud solution is virtualisation of IT assets reducing cost of replicating IT assets for the recovery site
• Despite obvious benefits of reduced costs end users are still reluctant to allow cloud suppliers to manage critical function like business continuity
• Industry surveys indicate cloud virtualisation with replication of virtual machine images lower disaster recovery time a shared recovery site through a cloud hosting service provider . Another key benefit is the elastic aspect of using IT assets that are on the basis of pay as you go rather than upfront purchase .
Moreover , cloud service providers tend to be hosted across multiple datacentres , regionally or globally , and therefore by default are in a position to meet the end user service requirements of delivering from a remote site to wherever the end user locates their disaster recovery site . The technology cost of meeting such service level agreements primarily around network connectivity and datacentre redundancy are aggregated by the cloud service provider across multiple end users , thereby reducing the per end user unit cost . Cloud service provider service agreements also allow lower recovery time and recovery point objectives at a cheaper cost than traditional solutions for end users , by choosing the right selection of options from within a service provider ’ s portfolio of offerings .
Industry surveys indicate that cloud virtualisation with replication of virtual machine images lower disaster recovery time as well as disaster recovery testing times . Another benefit of working with cloud service providers is the compliance and regulatory requirements they follow around standards of data security and data integrity .
Despite these obvious benefits of reduced costs and availability of best practices , end users are still reluctant to allow a cloud based , third party supplier to manage a critical function like business continuity and disaster recovery . Their stated concerns revolve around loss of control , reduced investment in infrastructure , and security . However , if end users start looking at SaaS solutions for applications and IaaS solutions for compute requirements , their inhibitions in cloud based services may be reduced .
Considering the growing trend of digital transformation and always on-business , the coming years are likely to see disaster recovery as service also grow into a standard cloud offering . www . intelligentcio . com INTELLIGENTCIO
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